HVAC Contractor Rate Calculator for BC

HVAC is two businesses under one roof, and they need two different prices. Service calls are short, scattered across town and paid by the hour or by a flat fee. Installs are big tickets where most of the invoice is equipment you paid for first. Price both off the same gut-feel number and one of them is almost always losing money. Here's how to build a rate from your real costs, then turn it into a service call fee and an install price.

Why HVAC rates are easy to get wrong

Your busiest weeks come in the first heat wave and the first cold snap, and the shoulder seasons can go quiet. Every service call carries drive time, a trip back to the supplier for a part, and sometimes a callback you can't bill. On the install side, a furnace or heat pump can be half the invoice or more, so a small slip in your equipment markup costs real money. A rate that covers all of that has to start with what the business costs to run.

Step 1: Add up your monthly overhead

For a small HVAC shop, the usual costs are:

• Service vans: payments or leases, fuel, repairs, ICBC and racking. Every tech needs one.

• Specialty tools: recovery machine, vacuum pump, gauges, combustion analyzer, leak detector, and their calibration, repairs and replacement

• Licences and permits: gas work in BC is regulated by Technical Safety BC, and a licensed gas contractor holds a surety bond and pulls a permit for each gas job. Work on refrigeration equipment that falls under Technical Safety BC's refrigeration rules needs its own contractor licence. Permit fees you can't pass on to the customer are overhead.

• Liability insurance and WorkSafeBC coverage. Your rate depends on your classification unit (look it up with WorkSafeBC); for reference, the 2026 average base rate across all BC industries is $1.55 per $100 of assessable payroll.

• Shop or storage for equipment, filters and parts stock

• Phone, dispatch and booking, quoting, office and bookkeeping

Step 2: Count your techs' full cost, not just their wage

A service tech at $38 an hour costs you more than $38. Add vacation pay, the employer share of CPP and EI, and WorkSafeBC on their payroll. In most cases that adds 10% to 15% on top of wages. Training to keep tickets current and time spent on warranty callbacks are paid hours too.

Step 3: Set the pay you actually need

Decide what you need to earn in a year before personal tax. If you're a sole proprietor, your income tax and both halves of CPP come out of that number, so it has to be higher than the wage you earned as someone else's tech.

Step 4: Count your real billable hours

There are roughly 1,870 working hours in a year after holidays and stat days. HVAC loses a lot of them to driving between calls, supplier runs, quoting, callbacks and slow shoulder-season weeks. Using 65% gives about 1,215 billable hours per tech per year.

Step 5: Work out the rate, then turn it into prices

Crew rate = (yearly overhead + your pay + tech cost) ÷ total billable crew hours. Add a profit margin on top. That rate drives three prices: your hourly service rate, your service call or diagnostic fee (built from the time an average call really takes, drive included), and the labour part of every install quote. Equipment gets its own markup on top.

Example: an owner and one service tech in the Okanagan

This is an example only, with round 2026 numbers. Your own costs will be different.

• Your pay: $90,000 a year ($7,500 a month)

• One service tech at $38 an hour: about $88,500 a year once vacation pay, employer CPP and EI and WorkSafeBC are added (an estimate)

• Overhead: two vans, fuel and repairs $2,600, insurance, licences, permits and WorkSafeBC $900, shop and parts storage $600, phone, dispatch and office $600, tool payments, calibration and other $900. That is $5,600 a month, or $67,200 a year.

• Total to cover: about $245,700 a year

• Billable hours: about 1,215 each, or 2,430 crew hours

• Break-even: about $101 per crew hour

• With a 10% to 15% profit margin: about $111 to $116 per crew hour

• If an average service call takes 1.5 hours with drive time, that call costs you about $150 before parts and profit. A $99 service call special loses money on every visit unless the repair that follows makes it back.

Now look at it from the sales side. Say about 40% of each sale is left after equipment, parts and your tech's wages. Your overhead and your own pay come to $13,100 a month, so this shop needs about $32,750 in sales a month just to break even. With an average job of $5,000 (a mix of service calls and installs), that's six or seven jobs a month. A $36,000 month leaves only about $1,300 after your pay. If equipment costs go up and you don't change your prices, and that 40% slips to 35%, the same $36,000 month loses about $500.

Try it with your own numbers in the calculator below. It is loaded with this example. Change any number to match your shop and it shows the monthly sales you need, the number of jobs that takes, and what happens if your margin slips by 5 points.